The Acquisition of Double Negation in Italian

This experimental study aims to investigate at what age Italian children master the logical concept of double negation, according to which two negatives cancel each other out yielding a positive meaning. Previous acquisitional studies on child languages indicate that children show a cross-linguistic preference for a negative concord interpretation of all multiple negation structures, including those that are double negation. Italian children aged between 3;10–8;2 were tested both in the comprehension and in the production of double negation sentences. The results show that Italian children master the Law of Double Negation by age 7;3. Moreover, the data collected suggest that younger children have already acquired this logical complex but, due to their limited working memory capacity, they have difficulty in its implementation.